Even the Wicked by Lawrence Block Page B

own.”
    “Probably. But you get a lot of different lifestyles in this town. There’s a fellow I know who got divorced six or seven years ago, and he still hasn’t got his own place.”
    “Where does he sleep?”
    “On a couch in his office. That’d be a cinch if he was self-employed, but he’s not. He’s some kind of mid-level executive at a firm with offices in the Flatiron Building. I guess he’s important enough to have a couch in his office.”
    “And when somebody catches him sleeping on it—”
    “He yawns and tells them how he stretched out for a minute and must have dozed off. Or he was working late and missed the last train to Connecticut. Who knows? He belongs to a fancy gym two blocks from there, and that’s where he has his shower every morning, right after his Nautilus circuit.”
    “Why doesn’t he just get an apartment?”
    “He says he can’t afford it,” I said, “but I think he’s just being neurotic about it. And I think he probably likes the idea that he’s getting over on everybody. He probably sees himself as an urban revolutionary, sleeping in the belly of the beast.”
    “On a leather sofa from Henredon.”
    “I don’t know if it’s leather or who made it, but that’s the idea. In the rest of the country people with no place to live sleep in their cars. New Yorkers don’t have cars, and a parking space here costs as much as an apartment in Sioux City. But we’re resourceful. We find a way.”
     
     
    In the morning I deposited Adrian Whitfield’s check and tried to think of something I could do to earn it. I spent a couple of hours reviewing press coverage of the case, then spoke to Wally Donn and checked the security arrangements they’d made. Whitfield had called first thing in the morning, but not before Wally’d seen a paper, so he’d known right away what the call was about.
    “Let me get your thinking on this,” he said, “since you know the guy and steered him over here, which incidentally I appreciate. We’re basically looking at him in three places, the courtroom and his home and his office. In court it’s a crowded public place, plus you have to go through a metal detector to get in.”
    “Which doesn’t mean somebody couldn’t wheel in a howitzer.”
    “I know, and this is a guy who walks through walls, right? Has he used a gun yet? He mostly goes for the throat. He strung up Vollmer and garroted Patsy S. and what was it the right-to-lifer got, a coat hanger around the neck?”
    “First he’d been stabbed.”
    “And what’s-his-name got his head chopped off, the black guy. Except that doesn’t count on account of his own man did it. Skippy, whatever his name was.”
    “Scipio.”
    “Anyway, no guns. The point is he’s not afraid to work close, and he always manages to get the vic in private. Which means Whitfield’s gonna have men around him all the time, but he’s especially not walking in anywhere by himself. Like the john in the Criminal Courts Building, for example. That’s where he got Patsy, isn’t it? In a toilet?”
    “That’s right.”
    “His MO’s all over the place,” he said, “which is a pain in the neck. You’re right about the abortion guy, he got stabbed first, and Vollmer pretty much got his head beat in, if I remember correctly. So the point is he’s not married to a single way of doing it, which means you can’t rule out a rifle shot from across the street.”
    “That’s hard to guard against.”
    “It’s close to impossible,” he agreed, “but there’s still precautions you can take. I got him wearing a Kevlar vest, which won’t stop everything but it’s still a lot more protection than he was getting from his Fruit of the Looms. For transportation he’s getting an armor-plated limo with impact-resistant glass all around. He’s got two men with him at all times, plus the driver who never leaves the vehicle.”
    He went on to run it all down for me. I couldn’t think of a way to improve